The Charge

You've made it through Halloween, now try and survive Christmas.

Opening Statement

Well, friends, the holiday season is upon us and you know what that means:
holiday horror! Surprisingly, there's plenty to choose from, though not a whole
lot of it is very good. This year, though, I have a gift for everyone, a
Christmas double feature. One is the second best holiday-themed slasher and the
other is one of the funniest, though quite terrible. The first two entries in
the Silent Night, Deadly Night series are a great gift idea for your
friends and family who enjoy feeling bad around the holidays.

Facts of the Case

Silent Night, Deadly Night: Billy's a good boy who loves Christmas,
but on one fateful Christmas Eve while driving home from Grampa's house, they
see Santa on the highway next to a broken down car. They stop to help, but he
wasn't in need, he was looking for murder. With his parents now dead, he and his
baby brother are sent to an orphanage, where they're routinely abused by the
nuns. Now 18, Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) leaves to start his life and finds a
job in a hardware store. That Christmas, his boss makes him play the store
Santa, which awakens the holiday maniac inside him, at which point he goes on a
bloody Christmas rampage.

Silent Night, Deadly Night 2: It been a few years since Billy's
rampage, and his baby brother, Ricky (Eric Freeman), is all grown up and ready
to strike out from his foster parents, where he went after the orphanage closed.
He's even more damaged than his brother, though, and doesn't even need a holiday
to spark his own violent insanity. All it takes for him is seeing something bad
go down around something that is red, and it's on. So, yeah, another
rampage.

The Evidence

The original Silent Night, Deadly Night is a violent, nasty piece of
holiday fare that works pretty well overall. Sure, it's cheap and the acting is
pretty amateurish, but there are some creative kills and a very mean spirit.
There's hardly a person who survives and those who do are thoroughly scarred by
it, which we'll see in the sequel.

Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 is one of the sorriest excuses for a
movie that I've ever seen. According to the commentary, it was always destined
to be this way, because the group funding the pictures basically just wanted a
re-edit of the original, which doesn't make sense in the first place, but that
was the directive. What it means for the movie is that the first 40 minutes of
this 80 minute picture are a recap of the original, using the same footage
around a framing story about Billy's little brother talking to a psychologist in
jail.

Then, the final 40 minutes are a genuinely mock-worthy film. Eric Freeman
puts in one of the worst performances you will ever see and, if you can stand
all the violence (because they recap all 13 murders from the original, the body
count stands somewhere above 20), you really do want to see it. It's brutally
awful and completely hilarious, along with most of the rest of the film. It's
the opposite of good cinema and worthless except for the laughter, but that
makes it worth quite a bit.

Anchor Bay's re-release of these two winners, which they've subtitled
"Christmas Survival Double Feature" (ironic, since there are
essentially no survivors), is much better than I expected. Both films look
really good, much better than they did on video, and much better than they
probably deserve. However, if you have the 2003 release of these two films, the
only benefit is that they're now on two discs rather a single flipper. Still, I
didn't have it and hadn't seen either of these movies in years, so I'm happy.
Silent Night, Deadly Night is uncut, with six extra minutes over the
theatrical release. That means portions that don't look great, and the uncut
footage is noticeably worse for wear. Otherwise, the transfer is very strong,
with good detail and color. The transfer on the sequel may be a little worse,
but it's a far cheaper movie, so that's understandable. The single channel mono
channels on both aren't anything special, but it's clear enough and just
fine.

Extras are fairly good. On the original, we have a phone interview with
director Charles E. Sellier, Jr., who is more known for his religious work,
which is really interesting, a poster and still gallery, and a bank of quotes
from concerned parents and outraged critics, which is hilarious. The sequel gets
an audio commentary with writer/director Lee Harry, writer Joseph H. Earle, and
star James Newman. They're pretty detailed, which is fairly surprising given the
film's level, a trailer, a still gallery, and a DVD-ROM copy of the original
screenplay, though I don't know why anyone would want to read it.

Closing Statement

As far as Christmas themed horror is concerned, the only movie that really
bests Silent Night, Deadly Night is Bob Clark's original and classic
Black Christmas. It's not a classic of the genre, but it's definitely
entertaining with some good kills and the ability to still shock and outrage.
Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 is pretty entertaining, too, but in a
totally different way. It's Mystery Science Theater 3000 material and,
for that, most definitely worth seeing.